Just watched the prerelease of Star Trek Continues Ep. 4 "The White Iris" which I got early access to as part of the Kickstarter. It's their first "feelings" episode. Now, I never much cared for the touchy feely episodes from the original, they were always brutally cringeworthy and I suspect they were brutally cringe even back in the 60s. Original Star Trek was not a subtle show full of realistic emotional scenes! Anyway, given the crap factor of the TOS feelings episodes, I think they did a great job in duplicating that exact same brutal cringeness the original series had. It is just as much as being beaten with a feelings dead fish as the original series was. So that's the good.

On the bad, I will say I thought the acting and especially the timing (editing) was not as good this episode as in the previous ones, in particular the cuts between facial gestures they had to pull to demonstrate their "feelings" were off by half a beat quite frequently. Not that the TOS was much better in some of the feelings episodes, but the best TOS feelings episodes (most of the better ones are the basis of the storyline in this Ep 4) were edited better than this. I suspect that the time available for post-production was limited with this episode as they are doing both Ep 4 and Ep 5 at the same time, and Ep 5 they're going off ship finally onto a planet so I guess there will be at least a big fight scene to post produce. And "feelings" episodes are always lame in Star Trek. Actually, pretty much all the "character development" episodes are lame in Star Trek, it's why I don't like Star Trek after about 1990.

I was also surprised McKenna as ship's counsellor wasn't much more present in this feelings episode. I would have thought this a good episode to have lots of her, and perhaps reduce how awful the TOS episodes were on "feelings". On this one topic actually I would hugely appreciate a deviation from perfect reproduction of the 60s look and feel - future "feelings" episodes could do with a ton more McKenna to make them less brutally awful. Less driving the storyline with Kirk not admitting his emotional weaknesses until it's almost too late, more driving the storyline with Kirk-McKenna interactions!